Architecture is a negotiated art, and it's highly political, and if you want to make buildings, there is diplomacy required.

I'm interested in conflict and confrontation.

In architecture, you arrive so late. I look at doctors, lawyers I know, and they're all buying boats and bailing out at 62. My career is just getting started.

I fought violently for the autonomy of architecture. It's a very passive, weak profession where people deliver a service. You want a blue door, you get a blue door. You want it to look neo-Spanish, you get neo-Spanish. Architecture with any authenticity represents resistance. Resistance is a good thing.

I always say, 'Be near science and technology, and you will never fail.'

I have had a small handful of truly blatantly discriminatory experiences for being transgender, but the vast majority are simply the differences between being a man versus being a woman in science and business.

From a UX standpoint, the toughest battle is how to make a platform that's really open so kids can use it but has sort of hooks and constraints so it's actually driving towards revealing parts of the world through science or through mathematics.

My whole interest is, how do you use evolution as an innovation engine? How does evolution solve new problems that life faces? And to have a system that can create a whole new chemical bond that biology hasn't done before, to me, demonstrates the power of nature to innovate.